THE SHIPPING FORECAST
CELEBRATING
100 YEARS
THE SHIPPING FORECAST
THE SHIPPING FORECAST
CELEBRATING 100 YEARS
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Copyright © Meg Clothier 2024
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First published by BBC Books in 2024 www.penguin.co.uk
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ISBN 9781785949265
Images © Tabitha Mary Ltd. (p. x), Met Office (p. 12) and Alamy (pp. 27, 90, 109, 135 and 150)
‘Glanmore Sonnets VII’ by Seamus Heaney from New and Selected Poems 1966–1987 is reprinted in this book by kind permission of Faber & Faber ‘The Shipping Forecast’ by John O’Donnell from Sunlight: New and Selected Poems is reprinted in this book by kind permission of Dedalus Press ‘Prayer’ by Carol Ann Duffy from Mean Time (published by Pan Macmillan) is reprinted in this book by kind permission of the poet
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For my brother
Enter Mariners, wet
The Tempest
WELCOME ABOARD
The Shipping Forecast is beautiful and useful. It’s saved lives; it sparks joy. It’s unapologetically geeky, but always stylish and slick. It whispers to us of adventure, of a life less ordinary, while being every bit as comforting as tea and toast. It’s serious, yes, self-important, never – mock it, plunder it, remix it, whatever you do, you can’t undermine it. It’s subtly different every day, and yet it’s unchanging and unchanged. And it’s been equally important to the hoariest fisherman, the hardiest sailor and to the new mother who catches ‘Sailing By’ during the long watches of the night.
Frankly, there’s never a bad time to hymn the Shipping Forecast’s myriad qualities, but the hundred-year anniversary is a golden opportunity to shout about that rare beast – a universally beloved British institution. It has weathered
THE SHIPPING FORECAST
the choppy seas of the last hundred years to sail blithely into the twenty-first century, determinedly itself, as popular as ever.
The Shipping Forecast, I’d go so far as to say, encapsulates some of the best things about Britain: our passion for public service, our sense of adventure, our love of quirkiness, our offbeat creativity. But even more than that, in a few hundred words, this singular radio programme is a slipway to understanding a surprising amount of our history and our culture, our literature and our lore. With the Shipping Forecast as our compass, we can explore both our country and ourselves: the good, the bad – the wondrous and the weird.
Batten down the hatches. We’re about to weigh anchor.
WEATHER
About to listen to SF + have a think
Note in an old logbook, 15 August 1999
47º 48' 40" N / 07º 24' 16" W
If you, like many people, love the Shipping Forecast for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with the meteorology, please skip instantly to WARNINGS. You might even consider skipping MAPS to OTHERWORLD as well, and starting at the end, which is all about the poetry. You could then work backwards, until you’re braced for this chapter, which is, I warn you, going to be a slosh of cold hard scientific seawater right down the back of your neck. I’m going to take the magical, mystical words of the Shipping Forecast and suck all the magic, all the mystery, right back out of them.
Nowadays, nobody pretends that those who go down to the sea in ships, whether to do business or to marvel at the wonders of the deep, nobody pretends those container-ship captains and super-yacht skippers rely on the Shipping Forecast to save them from the stormy winds. Inshore, there’s your mobile phone, the Met Office website.
THE SHIPPING FORECAST
There’s coastguard briefings over VHF radio. Offshore, there’s any number of fiendishly complex systems which will pipe info to your onboard computer via satellite or SSB radio. Nobody, I promise you, wants to read a book about them.
Instead, think of the Shipping Forecast as a Moana-style Polynesian canoe: main hull + balancing outrigger. A hundred years ago, the seafarers rode the main hull, with a few fascinated landlubbers on the outrigger. That’s flipped. Nowadays, the lubbers have taken up the paddles, while the sea-dogs are along for the ride. And that’s because, as a nation, we’ve taken the Shipping Forecast to our hearts.
When I first drafted this upwind flog of a chapter, I wrote, ‘The Shipping Forecast, as everyone knows, is broadcast on Radio 4 four times a day.’ I noted the times: 0048, 0520, 1201, 1754. I acknowledged that of the four, only dawn and middle-night go out on regular FM, with lunchtime and teatime relegated to long wave (along with God all year round and cricket in season). But time, it turned out, had overhauled me. Those long retro waves, so adept at reaching ships offshore, are sailing over the western horizon, bound for the Blessed Isles, there to dwell with mix-tapes and curdled-cream rotary phones. Today, we enjoy two forecasts a day during the working week, with a 1754 treat at the weekend.
WEATHER
The final four-bulletin day was Easter Sunday 2024. Weather-wise it had, by and large, turned out nice after one of the wettest winters since records began, but the forecast told us not to be complacent. There were warnings of gales in western areas, thanks to a low beetling from PLYMOUTH to FASTNET. A new low was lurking in DOGGER. Low one wasn’t going to trouble us where we were holidaying near Whitby, but low two meant we spent Easter Monday eating scones while the rain lashed the windows of a tea-room. But it was the bulletin’s grand finale, the area forecast for SOUTHEAST ICELAND, that was a real zinger: northeasterly 7 to severe gale 9, occasionally storm 10 at first – plus snow, poor visibility and icing. Icing, trust me, is Shipping Forecast nerd gold. And so, without further ado, let’s start decoding. First, those gale warnings. These come at the top of the broadcast, pinpointing any of the 31 succulently named forecast areas where the wind is expected to blow force 8 or more in the next 24 hours. Your basic starter-gale isn’t necessarily going to trouble a medium-to-large yacht, nor a biggish fishing boat, nor a ferry, tanker or container ship – so long as they have good visibility, good navigation equipment, enough sea room and no engine trouble. It would, however, be a total nightmare for a smaller boat.
THE SHIPPING FORECAST
Gales also turn shallower, inshore waters very ugly, very quickly: large seas build, making ports hard to enter and estuary bars impossible to cross. Plus, since the wind direction shifts dramatically when a gale passes, secure anchorages can become suddenly and frighteningly untenable. In other words, possibly counter-intuitively, if you’re out at sea when a gale hits, you’re often better off as far away from land as possible.
If you ratchet another step up the Beaufort scale, you’ll find that, with the same caveats, force 9 is just about survivable. Storm 10, on the other hand, which is like sticking your head out of a car window that’s doing 60 miles per hour, feels like the foothills of Armageddon. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced 11 or 12, but I imagine the less said about them, the better.
Next comes the general synopsis. A normal radio or television weather synopsis radiates bonhomie. The affable presenter agrees the weather has been dreadful, and either promises relief or apologises that there’s worse yet to come. The Shipping Forecast synopsis, by contrast, is a cool, calm and collected account of where stand the peaks of high pressure and the troughs of low pressure in our corner of the Atlantic. It’s this celestial view, this lofty contour map, which allows us to predict the wind, the rain, the weather.
WEATHER
High-pressure weather, whether in summer or winter, is nice weather. It is the twinkly smile of Father Christmas. It is the dew on the Easter Bunny’s paws. It is pink wine and barbecues and a proper bonfire night. But highpressure weather, alas, is the exception rather than the rule. Why? Because the various islands we call home rise from the sea slap-bang in the path of an endless cavalcade of low-pressure systems, which clatter towards us across the Atlantic, like bowling balls hurled by the weather gods. Sometimes, those balls fall into the gutters to the north or south of us, but more often than not they strike.
It’s a different story further south, closer to the equator. There the trade winds blow from the northeast, so equably, steadily and predictably that three weeks at sea crossing the Atlantic east–west is a breeze compared with just 24 short hours in the Western Approaches to the English Channel. Mariner-turned-writer Joseph Conrad, in his sort-of-autobiography The Mirror of the Sea, tells us the trade winds are like monarchs of long-established kingdoms, where stable institutions check undue ambition. But here in Britain, says Conrad, we’re governed by a more despotic ruler. ‘Clothed in a mantle of dazzling gold or draped in rags of black clouds like a beggar, the might of the Westerly Wind sits enthroned upon the western horizon with the whole North Atlantic as a footstool
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for his feet and the first twinkling stars making a diadem for his brow.’*
The general synopsis, therefore, helps us understand what sort of mood the West Wind is in, what he’s got up his sleeve – how big, you might say, his balls are. A deep low to the west, moving fast to the east, is a hairy scary ball. A shallow low to the east, a low that is, to coin a phrase, losing its identity, is not a ball over which you need lose any sleep. Why does it matter whether the lows are deep or shallow? Because air moves from high pressure to low pressure, so the bigger the pressure difference, the steeper the slope, the faster the balls, the bigger the wind, the bigger the waves. Those, pretty much, are the rules of the game.
And now for the area forecasts, a giant hopscotch grid chalked for the West Wind and his minions. We start at VIKING, off the coast of Norway obvs, and march south through the North Sea, taking in a GERMAN BIGHT, before turning west along the north coast of France, braving BISCAY and bottoming out at TRAFALGAR, not all that far from where the trade winds kick in. Next we turn, possibly reluctantly, back north, mop up the Bristol
* What the sea’s mirror reveals does rather depend on who’s doing the looking. In Conrad’s case, it shows his deep-seated mistrust of democracy, hence his affection for aerial autocrats.
WEATHER
Channel and the IRISH SEA, leave the island of Ireland and the HEBRIDES to starboard, before finishing up in
SOUTHEAST ICELAND.
For each area you hear:
1. Wind direction and speed, what you can expect in the next 24 hours. Variable and cyclonic function as get-out clauses for when the wind’s all over the shop, either because there’s none to speak of, or because a depression’s barrelling through.
2. Weather, be that vanilla showers, squally showers, wintry showers, thundery showers, rain or snow. Or fair. To be fair, sometimes it is fair.
3. Visibility, that infamous falling cadence. Good. Moderate. Poor. Technically, it’s about how far you can see, so many metres, so many nautical miles, and not a moral judgement delivered by some godling inside Broadcasting House, who’s wondering why you’re still up at 0048 on a school-night, shovelling down toast to mop up the five pints you drank in the pub after work. Very poor indeed.
What the Shipping Forecast doesn’t tell you about, or at least not explicitly, are fronts, which are those pencil strokes, decorated with semi-circles, triangles, or a mixture of the